futurefandomcom-20200229-history
The Invincible American Superpower (Incoming Disorder)
'Americans have tried harder than any other country in the world to destroy the United States. For almost 250 years running they've failed miserably.' That's a quote I found somewhere on the internet. But it's utterly true. The United States, by and large, is set to remain the world superpower - not forever - but at least for our lifetimes, our kids' lifetimes, and their kids' lifetimes. To put it mildly - America is invincible. With economic troubles comes civil disobedience. The American Civil Rights Movement returns to DC. And Americans will continue to slowly progress bit by bit, still remaining the world superpower. Explaining America: Invincibility, Isolation, and Sheer Luck America is a laundry list of gifts that all sit in one single place. it's like a shitty lottery where everyone else was given used, downgraded gifts and there's just that kid with trillions of dollars' worth of coddling settling him in. * The United States is interconnected in every way. For one, most of what makes the country what it is is connected by 21 thousand kilometres of constantly navigable river. The Mississippi River Basin is one of the nicest things known to man. It's always navigable, it actually stretches out over a substantial amount of land, and, best of all, there's this long line of intercoastal waterways - actually just disconnected sea blocked by a long line of barrier islands - which builds natural ports for the Americans all along the coast. This alone is already an impeccable expense gone. The basic infrastructure of a country is something that takes up a huge section of several nations' budgets - roads, highways, bridges - because without this amount of natural connection you're forced to build it. The Americans did the same thing and the advantage just widened several times over. Even then, if you want to get to California, you could just take the Panama Canal - and all other U.S territories are accessible easily by water. * Right underlaying the Mississippi Basin is something even greater. It's called the Midwestern Agricultural Area, and to put it bluntly I'm absolutely f#cking jealous. The entire agricultural area is so fat and wide it's about the size of Western Europe, and it has no catch-alls. So now you have easy-to-produce food that's also incredibly easy to move to where it needs to get to, because not only do multiple U.S cities lie right on these zones, the underlaying means that they can get to Albany in bulk quickly and efficiently. * Now, combine these two natural advantages and one last thing: the United States is functionally the world's only continent-island. Which is to mean that functionally, the United States is isolated from the rest of the world in that it runs North America as if it was a completely tiny island on its own. This is because there is no power capable of invading the United States. Hypothetically, you would need a massive population of at least 320 million, a blue-water navy, and more resources than a fourth of the world's total economy could ever supply. It's practically impossible. Every possible route of entry into the Americas is controlled by or allied with the US. Puerto Rico, Newfoundland, Hawaii, and so on. This means the US doesn't need to give a living shit about protecting its own borders, because to be frank there isn't - and has never been - a single threat that could pose a fundamental danger to the US since they finished the majority of the Continental United States' expansion. That means the average US citizen can watch their tax dollars go into funding a costly war in the Middle East and they won't even notice the difference. This amount of resources leads to three things: government coherence/competence, natural innovation and one hell of a buffer between exceptionalism and total disaster. The U.S government - even when being run by a party that has stripped its top ranks of coherence, passing rich appeasement bills and intensely racist, is still by and large one of the most professional organisations in the world - simply because there's nothing to screw up. Infrastructure is no where near a national need because the natural waterways make logistics coherent on their own. Innovation is created by simply removing the need to look for resources and freeing up capital that can be used on whatever the Americans want - atomic bombs, medicine, tech - and the world can only sit in envy. And this is why the Americans are the world superpower. To put it bluntly, they have nothing ''to fear. The Americans create the world's solutions or they make existing ones even better. The Americans can run the world's largest navy and piss all over the ''rest of the world combined ''- because the U.S Navy is larger than every other naval force in the world combined, not even to mention its professionalism that no other force can match. If run by equally competent generals, the Americans can show up to a country, decimate the entire fighting force of said country, and vanish in a month. Thus, the Americans run the global system. No one else can match. Not the Chinese or the Russians or the Germans - no, ''nobody. ''The Americans are the singular backbone upon which our entire world rests. Upon which entire regions survive. Remove that and you have one hell of a problem incoming for the world. Now, this leads to the Americans' almost complete isolation from economics on a political basis. As the United States is so economically powerful the only question that economically impacts Americans is not 'if' the Federal government can afford to give them the equitable treatment that is supporting Scandinavia and parts of Western Europe. The question is 'when'. Historically, American right-conservatives have taken it into their own hands to do everything in their power to prevent this from being a thing. This is simply a result of this question of 'when'. These people are on average remnants of the time before America was a superpower - a reminder of what was before Woodrow Wilson's entry into the First World War and the United States reinvented itself. Steadily their numbers have disappeared over the years. In 1910 the US had banned homosexuality, early Jim Crow laws, blatant racism against minorities and so on. Exactly one century later the Americans had given themselves a Black president, the first of what will be many LGBTQ+ protection laws were put on the books, and liberal groups continued to push further. Make no mistake: the American right have not only shrunk, they have weakened to the point that the modern American right are not only vulnerable to one last big push from another left-leaning movement, but they have pushed far-right in an effort to finally organise together the dying remnants of what was formerly America's powerful conservative movement (to some amount of success). This cycle of liberal movement then conservative pushback is slowly coming to its end - an end which, realistically, is far out of sight for most of us. Considering the volatility of American politics, that end could arrive as early as 2050 or as late as 2100. Regardless, it is coming. Goodbye World, Hello Americas: The next American play America's pullback from the world has been a long time coming. One of the major parts of America's current policy is the strategem that is simply forcing everyone to be reliant on the economic security that it provides, but the average American is just about done with that. The reasons are simple: the Middle East, Shale and the Second American Civil Rights Movement. An ending obsession with the Middle East The United States hates the Middle East - which explains its rabid obsession with trying to fight wars there. Since the September 11 Attacks of 2001, American forces have not only expanded their involvement in the region but built a wide-ranging stability network in order to keep its forces supplied and online. Forget the reason for why the Americans were ever there? If you want to maintain the global system, the Persian Gulf is a bare necessity - it supplies a majority of the world’s oil - and the Americans have struggled to keep the highly volatile mess online. Several wars, coups, massacres, and chemical weapons attacks later, Amercians either believe that the war with Iraq was a moral atrocity or a strategic mistake. In some sense, it truly was a total mistake, but the Americans were fighting there not to kick out the incumbent government - but for Bush to get re-elected and for the Saudi/Iranian clash to never come. The Americans have long known that the Saudis and the Iranians have, to say it bluntly, bad blood with one another. But American policy has seized on the strategic weaknesses of both nations to keep them from going to war - the Saudis are unable to put up a strong, united front in the absence of foreign support, the Iranians have almost all of their oil pass through one single facility on Kharg Island. But now the Americans are done with it all. Part of the reason why the Americans were so desperate to keep this game of no-direct-battle-please going on was because back in the day even the Americans were reliant on Persian/Arabian oil. But the Americans have found another source (I’ll elaborate further down) and don’t need them anymore. Add that to 6,000 American lives lost in the wars there and the Americans are done. For left-leaning parts of the country, the war was a moral blight and a fiscal waste. For the right-leaning parts of the country, they not only think the same but want out tomorrow - even if ''no ''peace process is achieved. Don’t even add in how pissed the Americans have been to find Osama Bin Laden three miles away from Pakistani West Point, or how the Israelis f#cked with the Palestinian peace process by inserting settlements, or how Russian guarantees were used to keep Bashar Al-Assad. The Middle East has just about wasted decades in American goodwill, and the Americans are just about done with it. Let’s get to the reason why they no longer need these countries’ oil. Shale: Expensive Energy Independence Traditional oil wells are simple. Drill down into a large liquid mass and suck it all up. It’s easy, it’s simple, and it’s profitable. But a lot of potential fuel sources we use are actually stuck in rock that’s scattered across in multiple thin layers that traditional drilling methods can't get out. Which brings us to shale. Shale is a special thing. It's expensive as hell, because unlike oil wells, in order to drain shale oil, you need to have pipes branching out in multiple directions on multiple layers from a single source. This requires a huge amount of know-how to work, and an even larger capital base to run. Anywhere else shale is practically impossible. But in the Americans’ backyard, where all the necessities for a large, booming shale industry to form have been fufilled, the world’s about to get a helluva lot easier. Simply put: America has the expertise, the capital, the economic conditions and the shale sources to kickstart an energy revolution for the North American continent. Don't even forget the fact that the huge amount of unsustainable shale companies that sprang up across the U.S made it possible for what happened next: a massive conglomerate of them working together. Combined expertise and manpower developed an immensely profitable alliance of energy companies - and it's already changing how everything works in the United States. For one, oil lobbyists are no longer strong enough in the United States to earn more than a scant mention in a few politicians' donation lists. They've become a tertiary force in American politics, not that they're too mad about it anyways - surely they'll find some country to bank off of - and secondly, Americans are soon going to have the cheapest oil in the world. Compared to the rest of the world, which is reliant on Persian Gulf oil and will soon find it readily ''not ''available - one of the main focal points of this new, orderless world - North America has become energy sufficient, without a painful multi-year government-led effort to push it. Instead, it's become this way all on its own. This is great for the Americans. There is no longer a single legitimate non-ethical reason left for the Americans to want to remain in the rest of the world, and all it will take to remove them is one last thing. Political Volatility. The Second American Civil Rights Movement This has been a long time coming. We're in the early stages of the New Civil Rights Movement. To put it bluntly, with the coming economic guarantees of the future, American politics is now down to a linear system. A linear system that will inevitably lead to the demise of the current American conservative movement. This is simply a matter of time - the Republican Party is out of date in a country that's far beyond it. Even with gerrymandering, suppression of voters, and dozens of other unscrupulous techniques, they only barely put Trump across the line in 2016 - in the Rust Belt states he should have won in droves he proceeded to win by just tiny, tiny margins. The next American generation is not conservative. It's going to be dictated by the incoming harms of Global Warming, high-cost healthcare, etc. and specifically what the Republicans have done to stymie progress on hot-button issues. Republicans came too late to try to reverse the impact that education has had on Americans kids - and the internet does not look good for them either. Even with trolls delivering stunning results for two years, liberal America has already discovered workarounds - and there's no real evidence that previously neutral voters have actually switch to their cause. Here's the hard part: this means that Republicans are leaning hard into their large moderate wing, trying to convince the 'Dems are bad, Reps are bad' crowd that the 'Dems are worse'. In a similar fashion, this will not eat into the Democratic base. But it does mean that this will eat into their future survivability - stacking courts across America has only heightened the need for impartial courts in the U.S, their attempts to destroy the ACA have instead ignited fury against current American healthcare, and so on. They might see the short-term results now, but the bigger change will be slow and painful. America's caucasians are about to become minority majorities. Linear trends are things I like to shy away from. But once you've removed the economic aspect of politics, a linear trend is all but guaranteed in one direction - sure, with pushes and pulls - but eventually in a single direction. In demography linear trends are almost guaranteed regardless. The impact of just majority birthrates being lower than minority birthrates means that in a place where there is no way for that to stop - especially the world's oldest federal republic - America's white-skinned persons are getting smaller as a piece of the population. On an intrinsic scale this is a disaster for Republicans. They've just about pissed off ''every single minority group that matters. Even historically conservative-leaning Hispanic-Americans look at the Republicans with a long, uneasy stare. Chinese-Americans they tried to court instead have rallied around liberal, third-party or (Chinese) causes. Indian-Americans are just as conservative as their Hispanic friends and they scratch their heads at the prospect of electing a Republican. The tides have turned against the GOP. The same cause that has cruised them to electoral victory will be their downfall. But not without a fight. The Republicans are not going to disappear. They're going to explode, implode, whatever sort of impact term you can come up with. Their pushback began in 2008 and it's only escalating from here as the rest of the United States is rudely awakened by highlighted white supremacist violence and others. In this course the GOP has - and will continue to - trample over every single minority right they can as part of courting white America. This isn't a good idea in the long term. For the near future, America’s politics becomes vulnerable and volatile. For the next decades the ‘civilised debates’ of Bush and Clinton are over. The violent reprisals the American right will have against their coming demise are unmistakable - and will emerge are, on a more relative scale, more normalised editions of the American Overton Window. But in times of political volatility the next score is already set. Both parts of the American political spectrum want out of the Middle East - out of the world. And this will not come in a decade - this is coming in 2020 or 2021. The Americans are out of the wider world. Hola, soy Americano: The Latin American Overture = Category:Incoming Disorder